Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Seriously, Ted. Just Shut Up.

I grew up listening to Ted Nugent’s music. I still like some of the early stuff (the later stuff, like Fred Bear and the Damn Yankees, are acts of musical genocide). But I really wish he’d just shut up now. He’s an ignorant buffoon saying stupid things like this:

Let’s also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare. Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them. That’s insane.

So why isn’t it equally insane to let people vote if they get taxpayer money in other ways? Using this “reasoning,” shouldn’t we also ban defense contractors and those who work for them from voting? And how about oil company executives, who get billions of dollars in taxpayer money every year in the form of subsidies and tax breaks? Or banks, which get massive loans from the Fed at little or no cost? Or investment companies, which lobby the government to prevent regulation on derivatives, causing the worst recession since the Great Depression? All of these people are as dependent on taxpayer money as any welfare recipient.

Comments

Funny, I was reading about this very idea on a right wing-nutjob blog a couple of weeks ago.

All the nuts were saying ‘if you don’t contribute, you don’t get a vote’. In the nutjob mind, everyone on welfare is able to work, just lazy…and that by denying people on welfare the vote, this will encourage them to get jobs!

Some of these nutjobs worked for 1$ an hour back in 1970, others lived in their cars so you know, *every* single person on welfare today has that option, right? They are just ‘too lazy’ to work for 1$ an hour, or to live outta their car. duh!

At the end, one brilliant commenter suggested that welfare be done away with completely and that the Salvation Army and the church be put in charge of ALL charity…

p.s. in a related thread, one hater even suggested that we go back to the Victorian style orphanage, because it was so much better back in Victorian times!

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These people are completely delusional and they blatanly ignore reality. They were told time and time again that not everyone on welfare is an able bodied male, and that children will suffer if we abolish welfare but they *just* *dont* *get* *it*

I honestly wonder how many conservatives read or watch A Christmas Carol and hate the sad ending where a hard-working job creator is browbeaten into giving the toils of his labour to a bunch of moochers.

Corporate handouts don’t count since corporations can’t vote (yet). The hardworking executives of companies like Hostess get paid by the corporation, a fictitious person who doesn’t need to eat, breathe, or sleep, much like Constructs and Undead in D&D. These much-abused executives are just ordinary working stiffs paid millions of dollars beyond their other millions in stocks and stock options.

Meanwhile, welfare recipients are too lazy to find a job in an economy with only 8% unemployment, and too weak-willed to live in cars, skip meals, and sell their children into slavery like any good capitalist would do.

I remember as a kid seeing a “sequel” to A Christmas Carol. Scrooge had become a so kind and generous that people lost all respect for him. The three ghosts showed up to once again show him the error of his ways. He saw the street urchins he thought he’d been helping were really targeting him as an easy mark and making fun of him behind his back. Bob Cratchit was taking advantage and walking all over him. In the end he sees that he’ll die a penniless laughingstock.

I haven’t thought about that in years. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? I may just have to find it again.

Yeah, let’s extend his reasoning to all people who work in industries that are in any way subsidized, bailed out, or given tax breaks by the government. And let’s add people who depend on the govermnent to pay for their work…like the entire defense business. Don’t want a bunch of soldiers, sailors, pilots, and other defense-insustry types voting to raise our taxes to pay for their lifestyle, do we?

More seriously, as for Nugent shutting up, that probably won’t happen, simply because he has no other career and no way of staying relevant to whatever audience he has left. Why, that would be like asking Rush Limbaugh to shut up! What would he do for a living — rake leaves?

I wonder how Ted feels about whether or not draft dodgers should have the right to vote as well?

“No American who avoided the draft [on welfare] should have the right to vote to send [for tax increases on] those Americans who are serving in the military [are working and paying taxes] to protect [support] them. That’s insane.”

What Snopes has to say about the confusing story of Ted Nugent dodging the draft. Whether or not he actually took meth and shat himself, he admits to being a draft dodger.

A Christmas Carol II (1985), an episode of the TV series George Burns Comedy Week in which it’s revealed that Scrooge is good-natured to a fault, and all of Camden Town takes advantage of his generosity. Scrooge is so giving of his fortune that the townspeople end up taking all his money. This prompts the spirits to return and make sure Scrooge reaches a median between his past and current behavior. (In the second alternate future, Scrooge has been buried in a pauper’s grave, under a headstone marked “Ebenoozer Screege.”)

There sure are, and most of them manage to diverge from the original story. The most common change is for Scrooge to go to Bob Crachit’s house for Christmas, which is wrong; Scrooge went to his nephew’s house. Disney’s version with Jim Carrey did get the details right about all the other ghosts Scrooge sees out the window after Marley’s ghost leaves, though.

Ah government benefits. So clearly, people who drive on roads paved and maintained by the state should not be able to vote. Nor should people who own businesses that sell food, because people on food stamps go there and buy food with government money. Actually any business owner should be excluded since someone could go into their store and spend welfare money in it. In fact, anyone who doesn’t live in a post-apocalyptic bunker in the middle of nowhere should be excluded because they are in some way benefiting (mooching) from the government. Come to think of it.. those bunker dwellers are getting the benefits of air and water regulations.. so we should exclude them as well.

People on welfare do not pay income tax and they live off taxpayer money so they should not have the right to vote

This is how the Ted Nugent’s of the world get around the problem that, in the end, *everyone* stands to benefit from government. They frame it in such a way that welfare people are 1) too lazy to work 2) dont pay enough taxes in the first place to earn the right to vote

I was at a Ted Nugent show in 2002 or 2003 in San Diego. It was a large bar venue where several hundred people could stand in front of the stage. The place probably held up to about 1500 to 3000 people and was about 1/2 full.

It was a post-9/11 show where Ted was attempting to distinguish himself as an authentic American hero with his convincing chicken hawk act. The people crowding the stage appeared to me to be almost all young Marines. They made it clear they didn’t give a flying fuck what Ted Nugent thought, they were there to rock and made that quite clear every time Ted opened up his yap.

If you lie, cheat, steal, underpay your employees, use shell corporations and offshore banking to avoid tax, lobby for taxpayer-funded bailouts for your private business, and then get all shouty about ‘big gubmint’ and ‘cut the debt!’, you’re just a good capitalist looking out for your own rational self interest.

However, if you’re at the bottom, and reluctantly slink into the local office and apply for disability or food stamps after three decades of backbreaking work and being pissed on every single day, you’re a leech and a moocher and the cause of everything that’s wrong with America and you should voluntarily throw yourself into the ovens for the good of society.

The new Senator from Nebraska, Deb Fisher, was tagged “welfare rancher” by her opponent, Democrat Bob Kerrey, because she became a millionaire acquiring leases to graze public land at well below market value, and leasing them to other people for a much higher amount. It seems someone in Congress put forward a bill to increase the cost of the leases; she went ballistic, and ran for Senate (and won, in spite of being a ‘welfare queen’).

How about this? Anyone who gains any benefit at all from the federal government can’t vote unless they voluntarily give up those benefits, and return the money they have received to the government. No one will vote. Or else they won’t drive on the roads.

Basically, the gist of it is that Crachit is a lazy moocher who is clearly only worth what he’s getting paid, otherwise he’d be somewhere else, and Scrooge is a virtuous job creator who has done no wrong.